Omni Everything?

Oh, but what if I want that kind of God? Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. That’s who God is.

Go ahead.

Sure, sure.

Look, I’m not gonna tell you no. What’s it gonna take to put you into a God today?

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are good.

We—

We got big things shaking on this week’s show. This, this week’s show is we’re, we’re tackling some of the, some of the grand concepts, some of the big issues.

Yes, man, so to speak.

All right, so coming up, we’re gonna start with a “What is that?” which in this case it’s three “What is thats?” which are omnipotence, omniscience, and omni—

Presence.

Presence, omnibenevolence, omni-everything. As many omnis as you can come up with. We’re going to talk about them. And, and are they—and is the God of the Bible those things?

Omni all those things.

Omni, omni those. We don’t know. We’ll, we’ll get to that. And then for our Chapter and Verse, we’re gonna dive into Acts 15 and you’re gonna explain something that I didn’t understand when I tried to read it.

And just two verses: Acts, Acts 15 , verse 16 and verse 17. But yeah, okay, and we’ll—

Well, then why did I read the whole chapter, Dan?

Because you’re a go-getter. You need the context. But yeah, we’ll—and we’ll talk more about that when we get there.

But for now, let’s dive into “What is that?”

All right, what is that?

So, yeah, it’s, it’s these concepts at this point just assumed and synonymous with the idea of the God of the Bible. The—these idea—the idea of omnipotence, which would be all-powerful—

Yes.

Omniscience, all-knowing, and omnipresence means everywhere at all times sort of thing.

Yes.

These are like literally they feel as fundamental as concepts about God can be. They feel just, just inextricable from the idea of our understanding of God. But it may not have always been that way. So maybe we should—let’s talk about these ideas, where they come from and, and sort of—you had some thoughts that you wanted to sort of start us out with?

Yeah, I, I think all three of these concepts have roots in certain features of deity concepts that are observed within the cognitive science of religion. Because in, in the cognitive science of religion, deity concepts arrive or arise initially because of the perception of agency in the world around us. And we attribute agency and intention to things that we don’t know about, don’t understand, or kind of initially, if something suddenly happens, the kind of intuitive first place our minds go is to some intentional agent.

So if someone saw—if someone saw an asteroid crashing into the ground, they would assume that someone or something threw it or, or made that happen.

Yeah, in, in the most fundamental, deepest roots of our mind, that’s where we’re going to first be led. If you’re in the middle of the night, you hear a crash, the first thing is, “Oh my gosh, what is that?” And then maybe your reflective cognition is like, “That’s the air conditioner kicking on,” or “That’s the thing you left precariously perched on the counter in the bathroom, you idiot.” The reflective cognition can overrule the intuitive cognition. But built into our intuitive cognition—and it only bubbles to the surface in certain instances—is the perception that there is agency. There are agents out in the world around us. We’re very sensitive to their presence.

Now, not just, not just “What is that?” when the crash happens, but actually, like, “Who is that?”

Yeah, this is something that goes back to even before humans evolved, was just a concern for protecting ourselves. And, and so a hypersensitivity to the presence of agents around us is very critical to survival. The, the primate that first assumed the rustling in the bushes was something that might have teeth and be focused on them, generally survived long enough to pass on their genes more than the primate that initially thought it was just the wind.

Right.

So, so there’s, there is an upside to this. And because there’s no real ceiling to our sensitivity to agency in the world around us, there’s not a point at which it threatens our survival. We can be phenomenally sensitive. And this is why horror movies make you feel like there’s somebody in the, in the dark shadows of the corner and, and in the dark basement when you’re running up the steps a little more hastily than you normally would. But these, these are things that are going on on an individual level. But once stories start to be created about these alternative realities with these unseen agents that are occupying them, then it moves to a social level. And there, you know, we develop rituals which are interactions with each other and with these unseen agents in order to facilitate a favorable relationship with them and all this kind of stuff. But one of the things that develops with these deity concepts is, or one of the reasons they become very salient on like a broader social level, like a national level.

Like why one of these entities might become like a patron deity or a national deity, or a large scale deity, is because they are perceived to be able to do some things that are helpful on a prosocial level. And so one of those things is monitoring. If you have an unseen agent who can monitor, they can more effectively ensure that people are not free riding. So if you have certain social expectations, certain social mores and standards, you want the people to live up to those standards. If there is an unseen agent who might be at any point in time monitoring you, then that is useful as a means of enforcing those social mores. And particularly if that unseen agent also has the capacity to punish in some way, shape or form. Deity concepts are also useful and are widespread because deities frequently are perceived to have access to what we call strategic information that is not necessarily all information, but to any information that might be useful to us for planning, for acting.

All of these things are anything that might influence decisions that we make.

So this could be like when to. When. Yeah, when to plant the crops or.

When to plant the crops? Yeah, if we’re going to invade, if we’re going to go out to battle against these people. Yeah. If we’ll be successful or if we should engage in this arranged marriage with this other nation. Like there are all kinds of things where we want information that we don’t have. And we even see this in the case of like ordeals. We need to know if this person killed this other person. We don’t have evidence. We’re leaving it up to the God. They will know and, and then they will engage in the punishment. And so we count on a deity to have all access to strategic information. This is not omniscience because it only bubbles to the surface when it’s needed. So initially it’s just like, well, can the deity do this? Yeah, the deity should be able to do this. We need this as strategic information. The deity can do this. And, and you see these kinds of things going on in the Bible, the way the God of the Bible is represented.

They are somebody who monitors. They are somebody who has full access to strategic information. They are somebody who can punish and they’re also somebody who can, who can do what needs to be done. If a deity is understood to be able to act in the world, then there are needs that humans have that they can’t fulfill on their own, that they might outsource to the deity and count on them to be able to fulfill. And usually this has to do with competition for goods or resources or protection or conquest, things like that. These are all things where deities frequently in the history of human civilization have been appealed to in order to get the job done. And then they get praised for their ability to get the job done.

And in, in sort of multi-deity civilizations, you know, ancient Greece or whatever, you could have a deity that was specific to one sort of thing. So you know, this, this deity is about protecting us in this scenario and giving us this specific kind of information. And if we want this specific information, we go to this other guy or whatever, right?

Yeah, exactly. So you have, you know, if you go to ancient Egypt, you’ve got a God of bricks. So you know, the brick guild, the brick making guild is, is very concerned for, for making sure that deity is appeased. And yeah, you have different deities that have some degree of sovereignty over some constituent element of the universe and its functioning. And you always wanted to ensure that the cycles always were functioning appropriately so that the river could flood, so that the crops could grow, so that the defense of the cities was successful, so that conquests of other cities were successful.

Had arisen.

Yeah. And so we, we see this kind of stuff in the Bible. So for instance, the, there’s a story of Achan, who was the one who, in the book of Joshua they were supposed to have destroyed all of the goods in this town that they, that they destroyed. And Achan decided to take some and, and you know, got a little bit of a five finger discount on some of the goods. And then they, they failed. The next city they attacked and Joshua was like, I don’t understand what’s going on. And God’s like, well one of your, one of your guys turns out he took something. And so what they do is they line up all of the, all of the tribes and the families and everything and then they whittle everything down. And God is the one who identifies Achan as the one who absconded with the goods that were supposed to be dedicated to herem. And then the earth opens up and swallows Achan. And that’ll happen.

No, you know, you don’t want to steal the stuff that God tells you not to steal, it’s just, it’s just not. You’re gonna get swallowed by the earth.

But that, that’s a perfect illustration of this thing that we see in society after society that has these unseen agents functioning as deities. They are there, they are monitoring to ensure that people are not free riding, which means they are taking the benefits of living within a society but not putting out what is expected. They’re not living up to the standards. And so Achan was a free rider and the deity used their capacity to monitor in order to call out the person who otherwise would have gotten away with it without anyone knowing and then the deity punished. So it’s in that story is kind of the quintessential patron deity doing what patron deities do. But you also see the God of the Bible represented as unable to do things and as not knowing certain things.

Yeah.

Being absent from places.

Yeah, that’s always stood out to me. You know, you look in the story of, of Adam and Eve in the garden and you know, they, they, they eat the apple, they eat the fruit, and then God comes in like, what, what happened? Why are you guys dressed like that? And that, that was, why are you hiding what’s happening? Yeah, which, which feels very, very much against the idea of an all knowing God.

Yeah. Because one God doesn’t know what’s going on here. And God is like, did you eat the, from the tree of which I pretty explicitly told you not to eat? So it, you know, there are multiple questions there. Where are you? Did you eat this fruit? And also the fact that they run and hide. Why? Because they hear God’s footsteps in the garden. Which is not omnipresence. Right.

That is, that does, it does localize him.

Yes. That is an entity that is restricted to a specific point in time and space. And also they have feet and weight and make noise walking around in the garden. And so this represents God as not omniscient, not omnipresent. And, and I, and I think, I think to a degree, if you’re not omniscient, then you’re also not omnipotent. I, I think there’s a degree to which there’s some overlap there. But anyway, there are other places where God is not omnipotent. For instance, in the first chapter of the Book of Judges , you’ve got the God is going to go out and fight a battle for the people of Judah. And then the text says that they, they failed in a specific battle. And the, it just says he and it’s not clear if it’s referring to Judah or to God, but irrespective, because God is supposed to be fighting their battles for them. Right.

If Judah fails, that means God failed to deliver as. As promised. And why? It was because the people they were fighting had chariots, Right? Had iron chariots. Yeah. And. And so it sounds an awful lot like God was unable to deliver in that. In that story. And we’ve talked on the podcast about another story where God loses home court advantage and loses the game.

Right.

In Second Kings Chapter three, when God promises the Israelite Judahite coalition victory when they invade Moab to try to extract the necessary funds from King Mesha, who has thrown off vassalage, and they fail. And it seems in the story because of that, it’s because of the intervention of the Moabite patron deity Chemosh. So God is not all powerful in a few different places in the text, even though God is represented in certain places as knowing everything that’s going to come.

But it’s. It’s limited and it’s spotty. And so again, you have situationally emergent situations where it is rhetorically useful to assert that God can do whatever needs to be done, that God knows whatever needs to be known, and that God can be in whatever places they need to be. And you have things like, you know, there’s nowhere I can hide from God. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that God is in all places at the same time. It means that God has access to all places. There’s nowhere you can go where God does not have access. There’s nothing you can hide that God can’t find. But an interesting thing happens after the Bible has been written and it is not univocal. There are a bunch of different perspectives. There are writers who thought it was rhetorically useful to have have God represented as not knowing something. There are writers who think it is rhetorically useful to represent God as being limited in time and space. God is there. People leave God’s presence. God leaves other people’s presence.

God is represented as having an existence in a specific point in time and space throughout the majority of the Hebrew Bible, and after the Bible, as later generations are negotiating with the text. I think what we get is a rhetorical kind of one upmanship. Every time there’s some other deity that does better, you got to say, oh, well, our God is, is better than this. And you see the rhetoric of incomparability in different places in the Bible. Who can compare to our God? No one, that’s who. And even the name, the name Michael, Mikhael, means who is like God? And the answer is, ain’t nobody. That’s their middle name. And so you have, you have this rhetoric that is constantly amplifying God’s ability to know, God’s ability to access locations, God’s ability to accomplish things. And so it keeps getting amplified until you reach a superlative degree.

And I think this is something that happens in some places within the more philosophically oriented layers of the Bible, which basically means the things written during or after the Greco Roman period and primarily in the New Testament. For instance, I think you have in 1 John 3:20 , the statement he knows everything, ginoskei panta, which just means he knows all things, which is, is obviously rhetorical, but tags that base of omniscience, right? And then so you have, so there are rhetorical contexts where this idea in its most basic form is achieved, where people are saying, oh yeah, well, God knows everything, all things. And then after the Bible, you have the more philosophically oriented thinkers within Christianity and Judaism who are looking back at the Bible and negotiating with it, and they’re still trying to develop a God concept that can compete.

And within the Greco Roman world, the concept of God, at least within the, on the philosophical side of things, was the superlative of everything, the unmoved mover, the first cause, the, you know, the thing that is all good and all that kind of stuff. And so because God is defined by these superlatives, God’s ability to know, God’s ability to be located wherever they need to be located, God’s ability to, to achieve things also gets ratcheted up to a superlative degree until you get this, the ideas of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. But then you also obviously have people saying, well, what about can God make a stone so large that God can’t lift it? Right? A lot of stuff like that. Can God do the impossible? Can, can God lie? And these are all these, these are the, the discussions that happen within the realm of philosophy. This is not what happens when, when priests are wondering if, when they’re going to plant their crops.

And these are not the things that are happening when somebody is contemplating why bad things happen to good people. These are things that happen as people engage in philosophical kind of dialectic, back and forth discussions. And that’s overwhelmingly taking place after the Bible. And so what, what began as kind of fundamental tent poles of deity concepts were because of the, their incorporation into these philosophical discussions, they get amplified to the superlative degrees within philosophical context. And suddenly your God isn’t just able to do the things that need to be done. Your God can do any and all things and even impossible things and even paradoxical things.

It’s a God that is located in all places. And, and so I, I think what we get is, is certain rhetorical, rhetorically useful concepts of God that are building on, innovating on, elaborating on these kind of basic ideas that then get picked up and philosophically further innovated on and elaborated on until we get to, oh, this is a deity that is omniscient, that is omnipotent, that is omnipresent, and that is the lens through which we have looked at deity ever since. And so that’s why it is fundamental, it is basic, it is intuitive, it’s just what a God is.

Right. It has only just now occurred to me that while I understand wanting to make God all of these things, these superlatives, and it makes sense that like, in order to make sense of the, you know, the innovations later in the Bible and, and just sort of how to make sense of this concept of a God that you would want these superlative nature, you know, descriptors to apply. It also seems like you lose something when you, when, when you, when you make the God this big and powerful and like, it, it feels like the God that, you know, the writers of the Old Testament were writing about was more recognizable and understandable, was more, you know what I mean? Like there was a sense of like, it’s like us, but more powerful and, and the God of omniscience and omnipotence doesn’t feel like, like us at all to me.

There’s, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to relate to that in any way.

Yeah. And, and that’s definitely a tension because one of the reasons that deity concepts are so, so useful, particularly on the individual level is because there is a relatability and there is an immanence that allows them to be approached in things like prayer and, and things like that. And so you’ve got a give and take between the function of the deity on an individual level and the function of the deity on a social level and even an institutional level. And so one is, you know, as one is increased, the other is somewhat decreased, which is why these deity concepts need constant curation because as the deity is elevated further and further away from the individual, you also need to say, well, we got prayer. We can always pray. God is always accessible through prayer. And so there are traditions where we have God who has, you know, legions of angels as intermediaries, but is still accessible directly through prayer by anyone.

And, and sometimes these concepts kind of, there’s a, there’s a feedback loop as well, because the, if you want a deity that is immanent, that is relatable, that is close to you, a deity that can be in all places at the same time is. There’s a degree to which that’s a little more intuitive. It’s like, well, they’re doing this thing over here for these other people, but I can also access the deity at the same time. So that’s part of that curation. Part of the reason you keep getting the ratcheting up is because you’re responding to concerns like these, a less relatable deity that is further away. And that’s kind of what Jesus does as well. Because with Jesus, it’s like, we got a dude, we got a guy. It’s a dude, it’s a man. He’s tactile, He’s. He’s material. He’s. He’s right there. He walked among us. Yeah. So in, in a sense, Jesus is kind of splitting.

The difference is.

Yeah, that is an interesting point. He’s. Jesus becomes. Yeah. The, the bridge between our human sort of life and, and, and experience and this increasingly foreign God figure.

Yeah. And, and, and this is why I argue that Jesus in, in some sense is functioning as a divine image, because that’s exactly what divine images do. We got this deity way up in the heavens, but check out this rock. It looks like him. And so we’re going to talk to the rock now. And, and you know, I’m kind of being, I’m treating it in kind of a crude manner, but it’s the, you know, it’s the idea of talking to a headstone. This represents the entity. It’s going to channel the, the agency of the entity intuitively. So I’m going to talk to it because it’s here, it’s in front of me, it has their name on it. And so it’s going to act that way. And so, yeah, there have always been ways that humans have tried to bring the deity near. And with the Reformation, we kind of went, we don’t like all the material stuff, we just want the scriptures.

What does that mean? I’m going to go read the scriptures. The Spirit is going to be here. I can feel it when I read the scriptures. You’re doing the exact same thing people did when they went to visit divine images or the, the same kind of thing that the Jesus tradition functions to do. It’s to bring God near, it’s to make God immanent as God becomes further and further away. Right?

Yeah. It, when, when I read the especially Old Testament depictions of the deity, you get, you, you know, you get anger, you get sort of, you get all of these very human emotions from, from God and, and it feel. And the more God is represented as omniscient and omnipotent and all knowing all of this stuff, like, it becomes harder for me to reconcile these ideas of like an angry God who would visit punishment on people and who would, you know, you know, become enraged or whatever. Like, that doesn’t, that doesn’t square as well for me. But when, but to think about an early concept where their God wasn’t omniscient and omnipotent to them, but was just more powerful than they were then all of those ideas, then, then those stories start to make a lot more sense in my mind.

Yeah. And, and here’s where I think the accident of the preservation of the Bible is such a boon to the later philosophical concept of God. It’s because this is the, the Amazon.com of religion. Oh, we got that too. Oh, you need a deity who can get mad. We got that over here. You need a deity that has no parts or passions. We got that over here. You need a deity that is concerned about, you know, your feelings. We got one of those too. God can be whatever the person needs God to be because God is represented in so many different ways.

Right.

And so anciently, it was like, hey, we need our God to lie through the prophet Micaiah to the king, to deceive the king to his death in battle against the Philistines. Hey, we got one right over here who can do that. You have this utility deity who can be represented in whatever way you need them. And so that’s why we have people today who are like, oh, yeah, God hates. God hates abortion. God hates, you know, members of the LGBTQIA community, they don’t write that all out on their sign. They write a much shorter word. Yes, but you need a God who hates. Great, we got that God, too. You need a God who loves. We got that God, too. But I, I think the fact that the Bible has been preserved in all of its multivocality and with all of its different conceptions of God just makes for a more utility deity so that, so that anybody, whatever kind of God you need, we got that kind of God.

And, and all you have to do to get that kind of God is to ignore the other parts.

Right, right.

That, that are.

That.

That pointed in a different direction.

Yeah, because every, every person who needs the kind of God over here, there’s also a person who’s like, why would you have that kind of God over there? And then you got an argument for that. Oh, well, this was just metaphorical. We need some kind of way to talk about God because God is beyond all description. And, you know, we’ll worry about apophatic theology a little later. But anyway, these folks over here, you know, it’s just a manner of speaking. They just needed to think about God in some way, so that’s how they did it. Oh, but what if I want that kind of God? Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s who God is.

Go ahead.

Sure, sure.

Look, I’m not going to tell you.

No, yeah.

What’s it going to take to put you into a God today?

And, and so, yeah, you, you’ve got the, the Swiss Army God who can be whatever someone needs that God to be, which is, I, I think that this is one of the reasons that the God of the Bible has become the most common God around the world is because it, it’s a deity that satisfies, you know, the philosophical concerns. You’ve got all the theologians who have, have, you know, developed a concept of deity that responds to all of the different, you know, criticisms and everything. And then you’ve also got the God who, you know, will happily kill the person you want to be killed if, if that’s what you need. So, and, and omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. Those are, those are three of the things that, that God became mostly after the Bible to satisfy the more philosophically oriented side of things even though, and, and you know, they’re, they’re happy to be like, oh, they got the cute story about God not knowing where Adam and Eve were hiding.

But you know, they, he was, God was just playing with them. God who—

He was kidding. He was kidding God.

Kids, like when you go into the parent, goes into the kids room and goes now where are you? You know, when they can see their feet sticking out from behind the curtain kind of thing. Obviously that’s what’s going on in the story of the Garden of Eden. It’s whatever you need it to be. Like, like the, the great poet once said, science is whatever we need it to be.

Well, that I, I think, I think that’s a fascinating discussion and I think a lot of people would be very shocked to hear someone say that the God of the Bible is not inherently omniscient, omnipotent, all of those things. I think, I think a lot of people would be very shocked to, to learn that that’s not, that that happened after that. That, that’s not directly in there.

Yeah, you, you see, you see hints at it, but it’s not programmatic. It’s not, it’s not a philosophical, metaphysical, kind of ontological doctrine until, until you get into 2nd, 3rd century CE. Yeah, but yeah, all right. It’s so fascinating.

I think I, I do too. I think that’s, I, I think that’s really interesting. Well, hey, speaking of that Bible there, should we, should we go do a chapter and verse?

Let’s do it.

All right, and we’re in. So we’re starting in Acts, chapter 15.

Acts, chapter 15. We’ve got the Jerusalem Council.

Yes, yes. We, we start with some fellas coming in and, and, and saying some stuff and then Paul and maybe Barnabas, but maybe there’s, there’s some, there’s some question as to who, who, who Paul is hanging out with, I think. Is that right? I don’t know.

It’s not really relevant to, not relevant.

To what we’re talking about. So let’s, let’s not get into that. Where we’re looking is remind me which, which of the things are we looking at? We’re looking at.

So let’s start in verse 12. I’m just gonna kind of summarize a bit. But verses 16 and 17 are the two verses that I want to look at, which are quotations from the Hebrew Bible that reveal something fascinating about this story. So they’re, they’re basically trying to decide if are we going to extend the Gospel to the Gentiles without requiring that they first convert to Judaism and, and, and adopt the, the cultural conventions of Judaism. And so in verse 12, the whole assembly, and I’m reading here from the NRSVUE and I’m gonna kind of bounce around a bit, but the whole assembly kept silence and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. And then you get this scene where they sit down and then the, the—after they finish speaking, James replied, my brothers, listen to me. So, so this is the, this is the patriarchal kind of figure standing up and is going to pronounce judgment. James is the brother of Jesus, the very brother of the Lord who stands up and he offers the final word on this.

It says in verse 14, Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles to take from among them a people for his name. And then in verse 15, this agrees with the words of the prophets as it is written. And then we get 16 and 17. And I’ll go ahead and read these two and then explain what happens at the Jerusalem Council and then go back to where these verses are coming from.

Because these two are presented, at least in the NRSVUE as, as quotations.

Yes, yes. So verse 16, after this, I will return and I will rebuild the dwelling of David which has fallen. From its ruins I will rebuild it and I will set it up so that all other peoples may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles, over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago. And so this is basically James is saying, hey, look, this prophet prophesied that there would come a time when the house of David would be rebuilt and it would be extended, the tent would be embiggened, so that all peoples might seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles, over whom my name has been called. So that’s the important phrase and beginning of verse 17, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord. Right. Now this is something that I found out when I got my first copy of the Bible when I was 20 years old.

I found out that when they quote the Old Testament in the New Testament and you go look up the Old Testament passages, sometimes they say different things from what you expect here. Yeah, so. So verses 16 and 17 are supposed to be quotations of Amos. This is the prophet that James is referring to. But—and this basically ended the discussion—like James says this. And then James is like, immediately he’s like, “Therefore, I have reached a decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God. But we should…” And then he says, “We got four rules. Four rules only. Don’t eat things polluted by idols. Stay away from sexual immorality. Stay away from whatever has been strangled, and stay away from blood.” So four very important things that have remained, obviously, incredibly important for just—so. Vitals. Yes, vital. But James basically says, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do.” And everybody else says, “Sounds great, James.”

And they draft letters to send out to everybody. But—so this passage basically ends the discussion. But when we go look at Amos 9:11 and 12—excuse me—here’s what those passages say: “On that day I will raise up the booth of David that has fallen and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it, as in the days of old.” Fair enough.

Okay.

“In order that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name,” says the Lord, who does this.

That sounds different.

It is different. Yeah, yeah. We got some big differences here. One of the biggest is that in the Greek of Acts, it says, “so that all people might seek the Lord.” In the Hebrew, what we have is “so that they might possess the remnant of Edom.” And the reason for the difference is that in the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint of this passage, there were two words that were changed. The word for “possess,” “they might possess,” which means “dispossess”—it means take over, control of, conquer the remnant of Edom. This is a reference to the nation of Israel reconquering the territory of Edom that at one point belonged to them, but they lost. So what Amos 9:12 is saying is that the house of David will be rebuilt so that David will regain the lands that it once possessed, that it lost, specifically the land of Edom.

And then it says, “and all the nations who are called by my name.” In other words, and any place that we conquered at some point where my name was called in that land, we’re going to get those lands back. Israel is going to be at its peak once again. That word for possess, conquer, conquest, that is—I think that’s yarash in Hebrew. Yeah, yarash. That is read as darash in Greek. Or in the Greek translation, they misunderstood it as darash. Darash is the verb for to seek. And so the Greek translator said—and whether this was intentional or unintentional, I’m not making a case in either direction. I don’t think we can know. Conservative Christians will be like, “Oh, this is all on purpose. It was guided by inspiration.” But whatever the cause, yarash is read as darash. And so it’s not “so that they might possess.”

It is “so that they might seek.” And who is going to seek? Well, in Amos 9:12 , it’s supposed to be the members of the house of David are going to repossess the remnant of Edom. But here, the remnant of Edom is read as the remnant of Adam or humanity.

Yeah. So Adam meaning Adam, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So Edom and Adam are spelled almost exactly the same. Right.

Because the ancient Hebrew wouldn’t have had—doesn’t have the vowels. Right? Is that why? Is that why they would be spelled the same?

Right now, now, in the Masoretic Text, there is a vav that represents an ancient consonant that is used as a vowel, which is something that we do in English, like the Y can be a vowel or a consonant. So they use a consonant to represent the “o” vowel there in the Masoretic Text. But in, you know, a thousand years earlier, it probably did not have the “o”—the vav there. So it would have been spelled exactly the same as Adam.

Okay.

And so the remnant of Edom has now become the remnant of Adam, and they become the subject of the verb. So it’s no longer “they will seek the…” or “they will dispossess or conquer the remnant of Edom.” It’s now “the remnant of humanity will seek.” And what will they seek? It doesn’t say. Why? Because the Hebrew doesn’t have anything there. You’ve rearranged the sentence, the clause, and now you have a transitive verb without an object. And so in the Book of Acts , the writer who is quoting from the Greek translation of Amos just says, “Oh, the Lord.” So what will they seek?

Now, if this were an actual verbatim account of what took place at the Jerusalem Council in, you know, the 30s CE in Jerusalem, James would have been speaking in probably Aramaic, but possibly Hebrew. James would not have been speaking in Greek to this crowd and would have

Been referencing the Hebrew scripture.

Right. And so if James had actually said this, James would have referred to the Hebrew. But J—and, and if James had referred to the Hebrew, the passage would have had absolutely no relevance.

Right. It wouldn’t have made any sense to bring up that particular scripture for this argument, for this concept.

Because the argument is we’re extending the Gospel to the Gentiles. Why? Because, well, the Greek translation says the Gentiles, the Gentiles are going to seek after the Lord. The Hebrew says absolutely no such thing. And so what this suggests is that this is a literary creation. This appeal to this passage on the part of James to close down the Jerusalem Council and to validate the extending of the Gospel to the Gentiles without first having them to convert to Judaism was a literary invention. It was something the author of the Book of Acts created. And they had to go back to their Greek translation of Amos to get the passage that would work the way they wanted it to work.

There you go. I mean, that I—one of the things that, you know, we’ve talked about is the fact that these books were written long after the fact, or many of these books were written long after the fact. We don’t—do we know who and when Acts was written? Like who wrote it, when it was written.

So traditionally it’s the same author as the Gospel of Luke . And I, and I think probably at least around half of scholars, if not more, would say that even if Luke wasn’t the author, whoever wrote the Gospel of Luke is probably also the same person who wrote the Book of Acts . I’m not so convinced of that, but they were. And we’ve talked with—we talked with Dr. Bond, about Helen Bond, about the dating of Luke-Acts.

Right.

How it might be second century, it might be something that as late as the 110s CE when it was written. So that would have been, you know, a good 75, maybe 80 years after this Council of Jerusalem would have taken place.

Yeah, I think this—I mean, I, I think you’ve made a really interesting argument here that they, that the way that this fell out, it was pro—like, even if the story is largely true, even if the story that’s being relayed about, you know, Simeon and, and, and Paul and Barnabas, Paul and everyone hearing James speak, even if all of that actually happened, it, see, it stands to reason that, like, you would want to include details and if you don’t have details at hand, you might want to inject some interesting stuff in just as a, as a flourish, if nothing else.

Yeah, yeah. And, and if you can have them appeal to Scripture, I mean that would just, that would be the cherry on top because it’s, you know, people use scripture an awful lot in arguments these days. In the early first century CE, who’s to say? Maybe they weren’t, maybe they didn’t quote scripture at all. And, and the author of Acts is like, we need some scripture in here. It gets, yeah.

Do you think that what this—in, one of the things that this indicates is that the person who wrote Acts was a native Greek speaker?

I think it suggests that they definitely have preference for the Greek Septuagint because although I don’t think we have a ton of discussions about differences between the, the Greek and the Hebrew yet within Christianity, later within Christianity, the idea is that the, the Greek translation is the original and that the Jewish folks, in order to try to undermine Christianity, altered their texts and that’s why they’re less, less messianic. And so I think it’s probably likely that that Greek was the first language. I think if they were able to engage fully with the Hebrew that this might have given them some pause. Unless they were just like, ah, my audience won’t know the difference. Which is certainly a plausibility—that, that certainly happens today where people write stuff just counting on their audience not knowing or caring.

So yeah, I don’t, I don’t know, but I would say I’m, I’m probably 60, 40, that if not their native language there was even, it was a better language for them than was Hebrew.

Or Aramaic or possibly could be the only language that they knew how to read.

Yeah.

And they, you know, they, they, they may have spoken other languages but this was the one that they learned to read and write in. It’s a, it’s just an interesting thing. I love moments like this because, because yeah, it does tell us, without meaning to, without any intention, it tells us so much a, so much bigger story just about the creation of these works and about, about sort of some behind the scenes stuff that we just don’t have access to otherwise.

Yeah, yeah. And, and I think it is an interesting. When I, when I first would read through the Bible and, and I would see something quoted from the Old Testament and I go check it out and be like, ah, that’s, that’s different. I, I did not have the skills or the resources or the ability to, or even the, the, the now I can’t even think of the word attention span to, to go track down what’s going on. But this is one that I always found fascinating that when I learned this I was like, huh, huh. That, that it seems like it’s a literary creation rather than, than something historical.

Yeah. And again, you know, like you say, you know, one of the things that, and I’ve talked about this on the show before, but one of the things that has always frustrated me about reading the Bible is that I don’t feel that I have anywhere near enough background to understand what I’m reading. There’s so many moments where I’m just like, what? I don’t, I don’t know what that is. So it’s so like. And without having your level of education about the whole thing, you’re kind of just not gonna, you know what I mean? There’s just the, the. I mean, this is why I like doing this podcast because things can start to actually, like, make a little bit of sense and stuff.

So it is, I think it is, it is fascinating when, because there are a lot of questions people and, and people ask me weird questions all the time or they’re like, hey, I noticed this. And I’m like, it’s nothing, it’s really boring. And, and those are not the answers people want. People want something like this where it’s like, look at all this stuff that we can, and we can realize about this text based on, on just comparing it to the Hebrew. And, and there are certainly lots of places throughout the Bible where we see this. But, but yeah, not everyone is a home run. Some of them, some of them are hit by pitch. Some of them are grounding out. So yeah, yeah.

All right, well, I, I love it. Fascinating stuff. If you would like to, to join to be part of making this podcast happen, friends at home, if you would like to, and especially if you would like to hear an early and ad free version of every show and, and also maybe have access to our After Party, which is weekly extra content. If you just can’t get enough of us, please consider going and becoming a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to write into us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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